Nick Gordon

Wildlife cameraman and producer Nick Gordon was one of the great film-making explorers. His crowning achievement was a seven-year project to produce the definitive film of the jaguar, the most elusive of the world's big cats.

His sudden death at the age of 51 came in his spiritual home, the wildest reaches of Amazonia, on the border between Venezuela and Brazil, doing the job that had been his passion for more than 20 years. Much of that time was spent living and filming with communities of forest Indians, tapping into their knowledge, recording their customs and participating in their rituals.

One of his first contacts with Indians came in 1991, with the Piaroa of Venezuelan Amazonia, who worship and eat the world's biggest spider, the goliath tarantula. Nick and his assistant, Gordon Buchanan, shared in a feast of roasted tarantula in the Piaroa's funeral cave, surrounded by remains of the Indians' ancestors and an accompanying plague of flies.

They washed down the spiders' legs with a bottle of champagne, shared with their hosts. "The Indians loved the champagne - they certainly liked it more than we did the tarantula," Nick recalled. The result was his film Tarantula!

On an expedition to the Cejal settlement of the Yanamamo, Nick and his Canadian colleague Rick West stumbled into preparations for a fight with a neighbouring village and were held captive by chanting warriors. Nick was also chased out of a village of the Satare Maus, but generally relations with the forest peoples were friendly and productive.

The Yanamamo and the Matis were invaluable sources of information and footage for the film Jaguar - Eater Of Souls, screened on ITV in 2001. The Matis, whose settlement was the remotest of all, 500 miles from the nearest village, formed an integral part of the story because of their affinity with the jaguar, which dominates their culture and rituals.

Nick Gordon was born in London and moved to Lancashire when he was nine. He went to the public school Lindisfarne college in north Wales, and trained as a chartered surveyor, but joining a sub-aqua club at the age of 19 changed his life. His first glimpse of the underwater world convinced him he wanted to be a wildlife cameraman.

It took 12 years to realise his ambition, but Nick stuck at it with typically dogged determination. At 26, he was taken on as a news cameraman by the BBC in Manchester, and it provided valuable training. "It doesn't matter if it's a one-minute news report or a one-hour wildlife documentary, the principles of telling a story in the time are the same," he said later. Survival Anglia, the former Norwich-based television natural history unit, provided his first UK commission in 1985 to film the giant otter in Guyana. Nick worked for Survival for 15 years, in Sierra Leone and Madagascar as well as in South America. He also filmed for the BBC - including footage for the acclaimed series Life Of Birds (1998) - and the National Geographic channel. His work was aired on Channel 4, as well as in more than 100 countries.

Nick began work on his jaguar epic in 1992, completing it in 1998, and in the meantime shot three other Amazonia documentaries for ITV: Creatures Of The Magic Water, on Amazon wildlife and its conservation (1995); Web Of The Spider Monkey (1996); and Gremlins: Faces In The Forest (1998), about marmosets. To film spider monkeys in the forest canopy, he shipped 10 tonnes of scaffolding from Britain to the Brazilian port of Manaus, and then transported it by canoe into the forest to build three filming towers up to 150-foot high.

Nick had a camp in the forest where he rescued and cared for many orphaned animals. They included two orphaned jaguar cubs which were eventually given to a new zoo park that opened in the region.

After 12 years working in the energy-sapping heat and humidity, and coping with recurring bouts of malaria and fever, he decided to spend more time in Britain. For many years he had a house on the Isle of Mull, but he moved to Lancashire, near his mother's home in Lytham St Annes, and a year ago married Antonieta, his Brazilian second wife.

However, the call of the rainforest proved irresistible. Nick had set up a production company, Wild at Heart, and, at the time of his death, was shooting a new seven-part series, Secrets Of The Amazon.

Nick won numerous awards for his films and wrote two books about his adventures: Tarantulas, Marmosets And Other Stories (1997) and In The Heart Of The Amazon (2002).

He is survived by Antonieta, his mother, and his two daughters, Charlie and Emma.

· Nicholas Cranber Gordon, wildlife cameraman and film producer, born May 9 1952; died April 25 2004